Search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity

Becomes possible only with perception that all

Human life is spiritual in its origin.

 (Allama Muhammad Iqbal)

Spiritual Democracy

The Ultimate Aim of Islam

By, Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

Abstract

According to American poet laureate Walt Whitman (1819-1882) since the notion of spirituality embraces the presence of God in Nature—including human being’s inner as well as outer nature—it can be asserted that Spirituality is a science of God. At the same time, recognizing God in every one’s nature—that we all come from God and every human being is naturally embedded with Divine spiritualty—binding the whole mankind with a common strand of spirituality reflects this notion as a truly democratic concept. We are, therefore, impelled to believe that Spiritual Democracy as a science of God must by necessity begin and end with mankind’s inner as well as outer nature. Above all the dynamism of Spiritual Democracy exposes the deeper historical and spiritual meanings of life related to racial and gender equality, marriage and economic equality, and laying greater emphasis on sociopolitical justice. (Walt Whitman)*

* Spiritual Democracy: North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 2014

By, Steven Herrmann.

 As a cultural movement, Islam rejects the old static view of the universe, and reaches a dynamic view, based on emotional system of unification, rejecting the blood-relationship as a basis of human unity, recognizing the worth of the individual. Considering blood relationship is earth-rootedness, the search for a purely psychological foundation of human unity becomes possible only with the perception that all human life is spiritual in its origin. . . It demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. Since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s loyalty to his own ideal nature. Humanity needs three things today—a spiritual interpretation of the universe, spiritual emancipation of the individual, and basic principles of a universal import, directing the evolution of human society on a spiritual basis. . . Islam is non-territorial in its character, and its aim is to furnish a model for the final combination of humanity by drawing its adherents from a variety of mutually repellent races, and then transforming this atomic aggregate into a people possessing a self-consciousness of their own—a collective will in heterogeneous mass. . . Let the Muslim of today appreciate his position, reconstruct his social life in the light of ultimate principles, and evolve, out of the hitherto partially revealed purpose of Islam, that spiritual democracy is the ultimate aim of Islam. (Allama Muhammad Iqbal)*

*The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lahore, Pakistan 1940:

By Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet philosopher of the East.

Full 18 pages artical can be read  at:

https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf

Sometimes it feels like white Christians are the only religious voting bloc with true sway in America. Conservative evangelicals in particular have a great deal of power in the Republican Party, thanks to their tight embrace of Donald Trump. I often hear people talk about how Democrats can win back some white Christian support, as if that should be the party’s priority in the coming years.

But with Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.

Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.

“When placed into context with our other findings from the 2024 post-election survey,” Deckman wrote, “we can see how distinct the unaffiliated are. They are almost three times as likely to report voting for Harris than Trump, and only Black Protestants reported voting for Harris at higher rates.”

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While genocide is a clear cause of the democrats’ defeat, economic issues are usually mentioned. What lingers behind the significance of the “it’s the economy” narrative?

This claim, which focuses on genocide, is controversial, as numerous other analysts assert that “the economy” was the decisive factor in the elections, based on polls. Nevertheless, we may gain further insight by consulting the views of an expert in the field:

“John Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. The Washington Post referred to John as one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among young Americans and in the age of digital and social media .”

Della Volpe writes about the U.S. election results:

“…Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places.

… When young Americans voiced deep moral concerns about Gaza and the humanitarian crisis unfolding there, they received carefully calibrated statements rather than genuine engagement with their pain. I believe this issue contributed to lower enthusiasm and turnout in battleground states in 2024 compared to 2020 .”

“One percentage point of voters.” Let that sink in! The citation above is from an abridged version of a New York Times opinion piece, now accessible only via a paywall .

Polls are not necessarily objective; they are often part of the mainstream media narrative surrounding elections and their outcomes. What implications does the question of “the economy”
have for the voter? Such a poll is inherently biased. Does it consider that the economy is inextricably linked to the accumulated U.S. multi-trillion military objectives around the globe, and therefore not an abstract soundbite up in the air, thus instead linked to imperialism? No.

The narrative of “it’s the economy,” as detached from its external manifestation of massive military and related expenditures, is so pervasive in popular consciousness that a spontaneous response of “the economy” is understood to refer to that relatively abstract and emasculated view based exclusively on domestic considerations such as inflation.

Given the above, if the issue of genocide played a decisive role in tipping the scales against Kamala Harris, one might wonder why it was not more prominently reflected in polling data. The pervasive narrative in the United States and the West is so omnipresent and airtight against even mentioning “Palestine” or “Gaza” that it becomes insidious. This narrative conflates pro-Palestine sentiments with anti-Zionism and antisemitism, creating an environment where voters might hesitate to provide such answers in surveys that could identify them. The fear of retaliation is a genuine concern in this highly charged atmosphere. However, as the Director of Polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has shown, in the anonymity of the voting cycle, many individuals who might have supported the Democratic candidate opted either to abstain or to vote for the anti-genocide Green Party, ultimately contributing to Harris’s defeat.

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Annie Rauwerda

Asterisk: You’re famous for the Depths of Wikipedia account, where you share factoids from some of the most arcane, interesting, and surprising pages on Wikipedia. But you’re also now a part of the broader Wikipedia community. How did you first get interested in the site, and how has your involvement changed over time? 

Annie Rauwerda: I started back in high school editing typos and adding things that I noticed were missing — like items to lists. But I had never done anything more than that because I was afraid of it because there are so many rules. Like, I’d seen the talk pages. And many of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and essays are very wordy.

Then I started the account — even though I felt a little like a phony. But I remember the first time I felt really excited about the Wikipedia community was when I got on a call with the president of Wikimedia, New York City, back in 2020. And she had told me about a guy named Jim who retired from working at the phone company. He worked in that big AT&T building that doesn’t have windows. I don’t know exactly what he did in there — but cables and stuff. Anyway, he’s retired now, and he spends all day biking around New York City and taking photos of infrastructure for Wikipedia, because Google Maps photos — and so many other photos — aren’t freely licensed. And I was like, that’s amazing.

So I kept hearing about more and more individual people and their shticks. There are a lot of generalists who edit Wikipedia, but there’s something so endearing about the people who have just one thing. That’s the first time I got excited. That was when I was brave enough to start making bolder changes and writing my own articles. 

A: Wikipedia’s tagline is the “free encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world,” which makes it sound like a cohesive, happy little family. But as you alluded to, there’s a lot of rules. It’s intimidating to write articles. Is it actually the case that there is a Wikipedia community, or is it more accurate to talk about communities within Wikipedia?

AR: The answer is both, of course, but when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they’re talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There’s not that many of them. 

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She’s not part of any community that we can tell.

But then there are hundreds of thousands of editors on English Wikipedia. And within that there are very specific communities that are really interesting. There’s the military history WikiProject. Maybe this makes sense because of the whole military thing, but they are very hierarchical. They have a lot of rules. They’re very efficient in reviewing articles. Also Wikipedia has a pretty outdated rating system for articles — one of which just got deprecated when “Featured Articles” and “Good Articles” became a thing — except for in military history, because that community was like, well, we need to have every level. 

The same thing is true of the tropical cyclones community. They also do a lot of reviewing, and they also tend to skew very young. It’s a lot of teenage boys in tropical cyclones. There’s also a very strong anti-vandal community, who similarly skew very young. 

A: Before I had Wikipedia friends, I did not really understand how many different silos there were.

AR: So many. There are acronyms that I hear that I do not know. The anti-vandal people especially are really off in their own world. One of the most effective, consistent, long serving anti-vandalism patrollers is not a teenager. He’s a PhD-level material scientist who used to write very high quality articles about chemicals. And then he just got too upset about vandalism and decided “I have to devote hours of my life — even though I have a family and a really demanding job — to this.”

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